If Ecclesiastes is right, then everything, including writers, has its season. In recent years, we've had the bracing winter of EM Forster, the happy summer of Jane Austen, the long, long, dreary autumn of Virginia Woolf and now, perhaps more surprisingly, the eternal spring of JM Barrie. As if the yearly sight of a flying young woman in green drag were not enough, film-makers, historians and novelists have discovered that behind the story of the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up was a medium-sized Scotsman, the most successful (both in wealth and popularity) of all the English-language dramatists of the Victorian age, a man who in his childhood was rejected by his unloving mother, and who turned to the company of children as an exile turns towards the Neverland he has been forced to abandon. So far, we've had the DVD of Ian Holm's marvelous BBC version of Barrie's life, Johnny Depp's abominable Hollywood extravaganza and now, Rodrigo Fresán's whimsical, intelligent, suspenseful novel, Kensington Gardens, gracefully translated by Natasha Wimmer from Fresán's inventive Argentinean Spanish.

Fortunately, Fresán has not set out merely to chronicle, under the cloak of fiction, Barrie's intriguing life. Instead, Barrie is the mirror, the doppelgänger of Fresán's protagonist, a successful children's author (obviously called Peter Hook), creator of the boy time-traveller Jim Yang. "I'm Barrie's remote but exemplary revenge," says Hook. "Barrie, who suffered so much for us, who died for our sins, and whose only and unpardonable crime was having written an infectious creature carrying an incurable disease." And he adds: "I was infected; and, terminally ill, I consecrated myself to the virus - literature -whose mission, hardly secret at all, is to kill reality and annihilate childhood, supplanting and improving both as much as possible until they've become immortal stories that will never grow old."

Barrie and Hook, seekers of eternal youth, are not the novel's only paired doubles: in fact, Kensington Gardens reads like a constantly unfolding looking-glass game. Hook's fictional adventurer is mirrored by the Japanese actor Keiko Kai, cursed with playing Jim Yang in the movies made from Hook's series; Hook's parents, flower children from the rock'n'roll 60s and habitués of the Warhol coterie, Mick Jagger and the Beatles, are mirrored by the Llewelyn Davieses, parents of the real-life Peter Pan and his brothers, and models of the Victorian middle class; Jim Yang is a modern incarnation of Barrie's flying hero, himself a composite of the five Llewelyn Davies children. And just as Barrie recognised his own lost childhood in his creation, Peter Hook too knows that his storybook hero is the boy he once was. "That boy isn't Jim Yang," he says. "That boy is me." Even the readers have their double. For close to 400 pages, Hook tells his story to a literally captive audience, the bound and gagged Keiko Kai, on whose cliff-hanger fate revolves the novel's brilliant and unexpected conclusion.

Rather than a single narrative, Kensington Gardens is an interweaving of many stories. We learn Hook's own saga, from the night on which Bob Dylan (another friend of his parents) vomited on the boy's lead soldiers, to his adult success as a children's writer cursed with a Rowling-like following. We follow Barrie's life, from the early death of his brother to the tragic end of his adored Llewelyn Davies boys. We are given the plots of several Jim Yang time-travelogues which hopefully explore happier endings for all kinds of terrible events in the historical past. And, almost as an afterthought, we are offered the twin heart of the story: the two maternal figures that cast their dark shadows over the novel: Barrie's mother, who never recovered from the death of Barrie's brother, her favourite child, and who thereafter ignored the boy Barrie completely, and Hook's mother who, as he recalls, died singing, "You're not mine ... You're not mine. " These maternal absences explain, if not justify, the twisted career of the Hook-Barrie narrator; each of these mothers mirrors the other while, in the fictional Peter Pan-Jim Yang world, both blend into one monstruous Mrs Darling. Neverland becomes Alwaysland because neglect breeds neglect: "Children begin as footnotes to their parents, and parents end up being footnotes to their children," says Hook to Keiko Kai. With astonishing skill, Fresán (who must be reckoned among the most notable of young Latin American writers) weaves all these various threads into a complex, gripping narrative about lost childhoods, phantom parents, and the resulting tragic adult lives. As Fresán makes clear, there are crimes of indifference that even the consolation of fiction can't remedy.

Perhaps it should not seem strange that we have renewed our interest in Barrie today, in the age of child pornography and Michael Jackson. Paedophilia means, or used to mean, not only sex with children but also love of children, very much this side of sexual molestation. In the midst of hideous images of sexual violence, Fresán reminds us that adult attachment to children (or, in Barrie's case, to boys, just as Lewis Carroll limited his affections to girls) can be salutary and life-enhancing.

That the search, less for immortality than for a sort of suspended eternity, can lead to loving children without doing them any kind of violence, admiring not their state of imagined innocence but their imaginative wisdom, their ability to re-invent the world in their own terms, their savage and serious re-enactments of social conflicts, their astonishing brutality and cunning, their ability to play out the great haunting problems of humanity, their sense of nonsense, courage, curiosity and wonder.